VT - Chapter 9 : Nine No Mo[1] (Patreon)

Disclaimer: Worm belongs to the one and only absolute chad, Wildblow. Enough said.

Somewhere on Earth Bet

–Simon—

“So, first order of business,” He clapped and spoke to himself as he pressed a few buttons and opened up a speech to text window, “Let’s name this Grand Chariot of ours.”

The second the words left his mouth, he knew what the name was going to be. He nodded to himself, accepting the name as the best he could come up with. He was always bad at naming stuff anyway, so he quickly typed in the name for the Name section in the software, before returning to the issue at hand.

Namely, his idea of empowering a bunch of civvies to take on some of the most powerful villains in the area. Well, not the Lungs or Kaisers of Brockton Bay, but most certainly the Leets and Ubers, capes who could do some damage, but would be knocked out by even the most elementary of Iron Man suits, let alone the advanced ones he had on hand.

Yup, the Iron Man suit was a Vehicle as well, which was such bullshit, but something that he was incredibly thankful for. Future renditions of the Iron Man suit had anti-telepath tech, but no anti-teleport tech. Sure, the ones he was going to hand out were not going to be enough to deal with the likes of Mama Mathres, but he had multiple contingencies in place to remove that.

For example, every single pixel of the footage coming to him was going to be filtered, for both audio and video. Even a mention of her name was going to put that file into a lockdown, and every single video reaching him was going to have the faces of every single person just slightly altered. Enough to tell him who it previously was, but also safeguarding himself from the second hand Master effect of who he considered to be the most dangerous Master on Earth Bet. 

He still had all the anti telepathy tech that would promptly knock him out, disable all the entries and exits in the system, and make the Grand Chariot hunker down in an attempt to ride down the attack until he woke up with his brain hopefully flushed of the Master attack. Different universes had different mental powers, and as such, different ways to detect and deal with them, so he had done his best to incorporate as much as he could.

It was such a pain to do so because he had to build the entire vehicle that contained that tech, and then take the particular tech he wanted from that vehicle and retrofit it into the current vehicle. Worse, because it was not part of his Tinker speciality, the work came out clunky, was the term for it. It worked perfectly; it integrated properly into the Grand Chariot, but it did not have the elegance, was what he wanted to say. It just stood out, and he had to create pathways that moved around that particular section, just so that the Grand Chariot would have proper paths to get to every section, for maintenance and stuff. Sure, his stuff did not need tinkertech level maintenance, but regular upkeep was still needed, not to mention any repairs that might be needed in case the Grand Chariot was attacked somehow.

Though, he would consider it a personal failure on his part if the Grand Chariot was found by the many big bads of this world who would undoubtedly attack it to get to him. He included Cauldron in that list as well.

His entire shtick was going to be that he was the guy in the chair, hidden away in some remote part of the world, churning out fantastical tech and acting as the tech as well as logistical support for the many heroes he was going to recruit soon.

Now, the hard part was actually selecting those heroes.

With his tech, he could either empower normies to punch above their weight, and he would have to choose a normie to deal with Jack Slash if he did not deal with that monster himself, or he could choose to empower people with powers. Sure, it might just give their shards more DATA to work with, and that information getting to Scion and gaining Zion’s attention was the worst thing possible, but he couldn't just operate with that fear.

By that logic, he would have to keep his work hidden from most capes, as all natural capes would feed data to Zion. Thankfully, he was mostly out of it now, and he was betting on that state continuing, otherwise, he would just have to hide right up until Cauldron had finished turning Taylor into some kind of hybrid human-shard thing that would act as their smoking gun.

No, that would be the coward’s way, and if Scion was really listening to his shards, then he should have already been under attack, and at the mercy of the Entity that would destroy him immediately.

Which meant that he was going to go forward and choose from a pool of both capes and normal people to use as his pawns–no, representatives. The word for the organisation was chosen as well, named Grand Chariot. Once again, he was not good with names, hence the same name.

Shaking his head, he looked at the list of capes whose identities he was aware of. That was going to be his task for the foreseeable future, until either some news of the S9 was picked up by the scanners, or there was something that happened in Brockton that required his attention. Something told him that Brockton Bay was going to have the honor of having his attention, and getting its villains demolished.

As for the capes - the Wards were out of the picture, atleast initially anyway. He did not want to bring that level of heat on kids, not to mention the PRT would never let them operate the suits anyway. Then came the actual cape Roster.

All of them had their pros and cons, with the biggest con being that they were a good authority following people, and would hand over his suits without much resistance. Sure, they came built in with self destruction and black boxed tech, but why waste perfectly good suits?

That left him rogues, villains, and normal people. A very big pool, sure, but the problem remained. He had the master key to all the suits, and any misbehaving with the suit might get them a trip to the upper atmosphere or into the ocean- well, the threat of one atleast. He was not going to actually risk their lives, but a threat of being thrown at the one in the Sky, or the one in the Sea, should be enough to straighten out even the most hardened of criminals, let alone normal people who would just have their greed overtake their rational senses for a bit.

Taking a deep breath, he thought of just who he could send the suits to, only for everything on the screen to be overridden, as low level chatter was picked up in an old logging and quarry town, sitting in a valley surrounded by forests on all sides.

Straightening up, he saw the texts being exchanged between people there, along with 911 calls that hung up a moment later, after which the texts stopped as well. He pressed a few buttons, and after only a moment’s hesitation, activated it.

The Juggernaut. A unit designed specifically to deal with capes that were hard to deal with in the conventional manner.

As the many assets he had stowed away in multiple places around the continental US began converging on the town, he pulled up more information on it, along with satellite information. Sure, doing this might draw the attention of Dragon, but as he had figured out in the past few months, he had severely overestimated Dragon’s capabilities, or rather, severely overestimated the level of access and authority she had in the USA. She could do all he feared her doing, but she would need to go through multiple levels of legal headaches, and clearances, something that she was not getting anytime soon.

Blackwater, Pennsylvania. 4800 population. Nearest PRT branch over 100 miles away, with the nearest interstate highway being 50 miles away. No parahuman presence nearby.

Basically, a perfectly rural town about to be decimated by the S9.

Not on my watch.

Even though he knew it was going to be futile, he sent in a tip to the nearest PRT branch about a possible S9 attack on the town. After that, he sent a tip to the public Dragon outreach email as well, before looking at the latest satellite feeds, something that required hacking into government assets, and he preferred to do that only during emergencies.

No reason to draw even more attention before he was ready with his big opening move. And thankfully, his first big move was right here, exposing them for just a split second before they likely cut off all communications around the town. If he was not wrong, they also had a tinker on hand, and even if network communications was not their specialty, cooking up a large scale wireless blocker was not the hardest of things to do, especially since the town was basically just two intersecting streets, and a gas station on either end of it. 

On the map in front of him, he saw over a dozen of his assets, all flying rapidly to the location. ETA was less than 2 minutes, but even that felt like an eternity, especially with the thought of that poor town under the tender mercies of an inhuman person like Jack Slash.

Just thinking of that person infuriated him. While he would have loved to have a normal person, someone Jack’s shard couldn't hijack or communicate with, to do the final deed and blow his head off, time was not on his side, and he couldn't let this opportunity escape just for showing off later on.

In preparation, the Grand Chariot moved closer to the East Coast as well, along with a few more proactive assets, ready to be burned if need be, to halt the likes of Eidolon and Alexandria. Legend, amongst the Triumvirate, was the trickiest opponent to deal with, especially once he was in that Breaker state. Eidolon was easy, as his combat patterns were researched to death on PHO. Alexandria was just a flying brick.

As it turns out, containing living energy was very hard, but then again, his power provided him with the perfect counter, something that was specifically designed for energy based beings. Unfortunately, that vehicle was really fragile in the grand scheme of things, so it was a one and done type of thing.

While he had deployed them as a precaution, he was sure that the Triumvirate were not going to show up today. They had no reason to be.

Shaking his head, he stopped distracting himself, his palms feeling sweaty as he kept his gaze on all the assets arriving at the location. See, even if he was not a Thinker, he had the god given superpower of being an overthinker even before he was dumped into this world. So, he had read plenty of fanfics and, as such, had done plenty of showers thinking about the world and its many threats.

Of course, the Slaughter House 9 were part of that as well. More specifically, the containment and then death protocols for all of the current roster. If he was not wrong, one of Heartbreaker’s children was not yet here, so that left him with 8 people, provided they hadn't killed off that one person he had no information about. He just knew that someone from the Nine had killed a member, requiring Jack to recruit another one, and Cherish happened to come right along, with delusions of being able to Master a group of people even her mad father wouldn't get close to.

The members he had known about and prepared strategies for were as follows - 

Jack Slash. Bonesaw. Mannequin. Crawler. Shatterbird. Burnscar. The Siberian. Hatchet Face.

Out of all of them, Siberian was the biggest threat to most capes, but nothing he couldn't handle, especially since he wasn’t even on the same continent as them.

A ping told him that the first suit had arrived. 

See, the thing about most of the members of the Slaughter House Nine was that most of them were just regular humans with regular durability before they were upgraded by Bonesaw, but even then, he knew that none of them were outright bulletproof or any other proof on the same level as, say, Crawler, Siberian, or even Glory Girl from Brockton Bay.

The Wet Tinker had enhanced them and made them as unkillable as possible, but not to the point that his current plan would fail. Because of that, the Iron Man suit would be enough for more than half of the current roster.